I also thought that was a weird comment. But In my experience a big team benefits from a compiled, statically typed language like Java (better yet, Scala). Perhaps that's what the author meant.
My experiences with Java have never been very impressive. Why do you think a bigger team benefits from static typing?
Another advantage of statically typed OOP code for big teams is it allows a verbose yet formal way to define interfaces as a team, and then break up the work into smaller chunks. The formality can certainly slow an individual programmer down, but in a big team I've found it makes breaking up the work easier.
I wouldn't argue against the notion that ruby's expressiveness and use of functional paradigms might make up for it's lack of static typing, and ruby in the hands of a great programmer is pure pleasure, but most teams don't have just great programmers.
Finally, I absolutely love Scala and I think it's worth mentioning in any discussion of ruby and java. It, sorta, bridges the gap between the two languages and I'd recommend it as a good choice for a team of any size.
But if you're not testing your code, then the compiler is indeed a great dose of confidence.
I do, though, firmly agree with this: "I wouldn't argue against the notion that ruby's expressiveness and use of functional paradigms might make up for it's lack of static typing, and ruby in the hands of a great programmer is pure pleasure, but most teams don't have just great programmers."
Ultimately things do depend quite a bit on the developer resources you have.
So, what I would love to see is a Web Framework similar to RoR written in Scala ...
Aside from JSP, we're really happy w/ Spring MVC. We've managed to avoid the crazy amounts of XML that Spring is known for in favor of its more modern annotation-based way of doing things.
Large teams should be hunted down and broken into smaller teams, it's a stupid idea to have such a large team anyway.
The biggest problems in Java are not static typing (although inferred typing is much better). They are the lack of first class constructors, functions, unsigned types, operator definition and overloading and closures. The one actual feature Java has that no one else has is ironically one that is also one of the worst things about Java: checked exceptions.
When java lets me write something like: let (|>) x y = y x is the day I'll consider using it again, btw the above code is the pipe operator which lets you do things like this.
"Hello World!" |> puts "10".to_i #=> 10
10.to_i #=> 10